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It is positive that there are now moves towards a ceasefire, however temporary and limited, in Ukraine.
Agreement to halt attacks on energy infrastructure by both sides is welcome, as it is the first de-escalation of hostilities in more than three years. Hopefully, it will be implemented fully.
However, it falls far short of the complete ceasefire that is needed, as a precursor to peace talks.
President Putin has refused to sign up to the thirty-day ceasefire across the board proposed by Trump and Zelensky. Some of his concerns are rational – who will monitor a halt to conflict along a very long battlefront? A ceasefire is also of little or no value if it is simply a few weeks-long pause to restock and resupply weapons. It is very rare for a combatant in the more advantageous position militarily – presently Russia – to agree to a ceasefire on such terms.
However, Putin presently seems unwilling to contemplate ending the war except on the basis of a full capitulation to Russia’s terms.
The demand that Ukraine remain excluded from NATO has been conceded by Trump, and is probably tacitly accepted even by Keir Starmer’s more aggressive ‘coalition of the willing.’
But Starmer’s plans for the deployment of British and French troops to Ukraine is a very thinly-disguised way to bring NATO in by the back door. If the military of Britain and France – the two most powerful and aggressive NATO states after the USA – are present in force, and if they have the “backstop” of US support as Starmer demands, then you have a NATO presence in all but name.
So far Trump has shown little interest in agreeing to Starmer’s plan. He is focussed solely on a neo-colonial carve-up of Ukraine’s territory and resources between Washington and Moscow. Already he has imposed a rapacious minerals deal on Kyiv and now wants to take control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, presently in the hands of the Russian army, as well.
In truth, Ukraine’s sovereignty has long been mortgaged to the USA as the price of the “proxy war” which has been fought over its territory since 2022.
The present proposals echo the divisions over access to Ukraine’s economy between Russia and the European Union which led to the Maidan coup against the elected government in 2014.
There can be no justification for Russia not now accepting a ceasefire. While it has the advantage militarily, largely due to its capacity to mobilise more soldiers for the slaughter, its gains over the last eighteen months have been tiny in terms of territory and secured at a vast human cost. Nearly all it presently holds it secured in the first weeks of the invasion.
Russia’s security concerns must be addressed in any deal, but it has no right to seek to dictate the internal politics of Ukraine and clearly must respect any new state boundaries or lines of demarcation, which presumably will roughly correspond to present military dispositions.
In Britain we have to clearly oppose Starmer’s ‘coalition of the willing’ and explain that his plan to deploy troops in Ukraine is in reality a plan to sabotage any prospect of a peace settlement.
We must also make clear that pouring arms and resources into Ukraine is entirely unjustified, particularly as his government embarks on a new round of austerity here at home. Welfare not warfare is our demand, as we reject the escalating military budget planned for the coming years, and the war psychosis that accompanies it.
We make it clear that there is no ‘Russian threat’ to Britain, and demand that Starmer cease working to prolong the war in Ukraine in the interests of the arms companies and British imperialism generally.